Is it worth it depends on who you ask. Should you care? You bet you should! First let’s define what a cold call is. For a study Baylor University did a few years ago they considered a cold call as a telephone call to a random list with no pre-qualifications and only a geographic parameter. The study was conducted by students – millennials – so the idea of any in-person contact didn’t even cross their minds! They enlisted the assistance of 160 real estate professionals with a national firm. Their goal was to set appointments.
The Baylor study, even with no pre-qualification and only phone contact, showed there is value. Without going into the number of calls to get an appointment and costs for each successful transaction, the final count showed value.
For professionals in the promotional marketing/specialty advertising industry, we do have to look at an important consideration. If you are a new company just ramping up, prospecting for clients and doing it efficiently is required. For well established businesses, you may get greater revenue generation from a more active and focused relationship with existing customers. This information, however, will still be useful to deal with attrition, which is estimated to be a minimum of 15 percent of your current business each year.
If you did your own research on this topic as I did you would find that content marketing firms, digital ad agencies, web developers and other “digital enthusiasts” consider cold calling dead and want to bury it forever. There is another side to this story.
Competition is a good thing in any strong market because it gives a marketer a chance to differentiate from the others. By showing your USP (unique selling proposition) to a client, you leave the crowd behind. But what if that crowd is so large that you have little or no chance to show your USP? A Google search for “promotional products” brings back 74.4 million hits! If you read my other articles and realize you don’t sell products, the situation improves a bit. A search for “advertising specialties” only will get you 3.9 million competitors. If you stop searching for things and instead look for marketing support by searching for “specialty advertising” you only have to compete with 3.5 million others!
Another reality is that a majority of people you talk to on the phone will ask if you have a website they can look at. A great way to get off the call and even if they do take a look, they will be exposed to many other offers similar to yours.
The cold calling Baylor did, even with valuable results, is not anything I would recommend. But with pre-selection and pre-qualification, the work associated with cold calling goes down and the value shoots up quickly. Nothing should be random. Be highly selective choosing businesses YOU want as clients. Check on their backgrounds and even run a credit check if you use a credit service. Once you have YOUR list, then decide on how you will cold call the account.
Phoning for appointments is tedious, will not get you to the proper person about half the time and most of all has no continuing effect on the potential client. But what if you actually use the same powerful marketing media you want a chance to discuss with the potential client? The next part of this gets scary so be sure you are sitting down. What if you actually made an in-person sales call on the account? Even if you assume that the person you need to see will not be available you can accomplish a lot.
Leave behind your catalog, business card and a “gift” for the person you want to see. Your gift – a well selected promotional item – will absolutely be delivered for you, by hand to the right person. The fact that you are a living breathing human being and not a faceless website will be inescapable. You actually have then demonstrated the power of promotional specialty marketing because you got right to the boss’s desk! And you will have a continuing potential to influence since your “gift” will stay with the prospect long term. When you follow up with your call and indicate that you dropped off a gift and your card, the chance of getting past the gatekeeper goes way up. If you left him/her with a gift, too, your contact with the boss is almost guaranteed.
You can continue to stand in line with millions of competitors; you can even jump up and wave flags (banners for the digital crowd) to try to get their attention, or you can get out of the line and go straight to the front, knock on the prospect’s door and let them know you are on the job, in their community and ready to help them grow their business.
One last thing. If you read this whole article, you are a tiny minority of the people that saw the words cold calling in the title and never went any farther. The same is true in the marketplace – you will have virtually no competition knocking on the same door. Sometimes that path less traveled is actually a shortcut.
Gregg Emmer is chief marketing officer and vice president at Kaeser & Blair, Inc. He has more than 40 years experience in marketing and the promotional specialty advertising industry. His outside consultancy provides marketing, public relations and business planning consulting to a wide range of other businesses, and has been a useful knowledge base for K&B Dealers. Contact Gregg at gemmer@kaeser-blair.com.